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Friday November 15, 2013 11:53 am PST by Jordan GolsonPhil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, took the stand in the damages retrial between Apple and Samsung earlier today, testifying as the two companies argue over how much Samsung should pay Apple after the latter company won its patent lawsuit last year.

Apple is asking for $379 million in damages, while Samsung believes it should only need to pay $52 million.

Last year, Samsung was ordered to pay Apple a total of $1.05 billion after a jury found the South Korean company guilty of willfully violating multiple Apple patents. Back in March, Judge Lucy Koh struck $450 million from the $1 billion awarded to Samsung after deciding the jury may have miscalculated the damages due to a misunderstanding of patent issues.

According to CNET, Schiller told the jury that Samsung made it "much harder" for Apple to market and sell its devices, and that Samsung's behavior has made it "harder for us to get new customers and bring them into our ecosystem."

He added that Apple's marketing strategy revolves around "the product as the hero," highlighting features and capabilities that differentiate its devices from all others on the market. But Samsung's devices caused consumers to "question our design skills in a way they never used to," Schiller said.

He also echoed comments from the trial last year, saying he was shocked when he saw Samsung's Galaxy phones.

"It looked exactly like the iPhone, so much so people might confuse it," Schiller said.

After Schiller's testimony and cross-examination, Apple rested its case and Samsung took over after a lunch break. The trial is expected to conclude in the middle of next week.

According to Chinese site C Technology [Google Translate, via Unwired View], Apple is continuing to reduce its orders for the iPhone 5c with suppliers, still working to balance production with customer demand that has remained very strongly in favor of the higher-priced iPhone 5s.

The report claims that Apple's main assembly partner ProTek (Pegatron) has slashed production from 320,000 units per day in October to just 80,000 units per day. Similarly, Apple's backup assembler for the iPhone 5c, Foxconn, is operating at only a minimum capacity of 8-9,000 units per day.

Customer interest in Apple's iPhone 5s has continued to outpace that of the iPhone 5c, with Chinese mobile phone retailer D.Phone reporting that that the iPhone 5s is holding a 3.68:1 advantage over the iPhone 5c among its customers, according to MyDrivers [Google Translate].

Similar signs of continued iPhone 5s strength are showing up in data from analytics firm Fiksu, which shows iPhone 5s activity outpacing iPhone 5c activity by a 3-to-1 margin. As of today, Fiksu is seeing the iPhone 5s accounting for 6.4% of active iPhone devices on its network, with the iPhone 5c accounting for just 2.1%. That gap has grown over the past month, with the iPhone 5s previously outperforming the iPhone 5c by a roughly 2-to-1 margin.

Reports of Apple cutting iPhone 5c production are not new, but if the numbers in this latest report are correct, the cuts are even deeper than previously reported.

While iPhone 5c supplies have been plentiful since the device's September launch, the iPhone 5s has been much more constrained and is only now beginning to see improved supplies. Earlier this week, shipping estimates for new orders through Apple's online store improved to 1-2 weeks, while the various models are showing significantly improved availability in Apple's retail stores.

Nvidia on Monday took the wraps off of its Tesla K40 GPU accelerator, supposedly the world's highest performance accelerator ever built. The card is intended for extreme performance applications in the fields of scientific research, engineering, high performance computing (HPC), and enterprise applications. For heavy duty tasks, the Tesla K40 GPU boasts twice as much memory as its predecessor (Tesla K20x) and up to 40 percent higher performance, Nvidia says.

It also features 10 times higher performance than today's fastest CPU. Such is the strength of Nvidia' Kepler's compute architecture. In this case, the Tesla K40 offers 4.29 teraflops of single-precision and 1.43 teraflops of double-precision peak floating point performance.

"GPU accelerators have gone mainstream in the HPC and supercomputing industries, enabling engineers and researchers to consistently drive innovation and scientific discovery," said Sumit Gupta, general manager of Tesla Accelerated Computing products at Nvidia. "With the breakthrough performance and higher memory capacity of the Tesla K40 GPU, enterprise customers can quickly crunch through massive volumes of data generated by their big data analytics applications."

Nvidia equipped the card with 12GB of GDDR5 memory and 2,880 CUDA parallel processing cores; memory bandwidth is rated at 288GB/s. On the software side, Nvidia said that there are over 240 professional software applications that take advantage of GPU acceleration.

The Tesla K40 is available now and in the coming months from a variety of server manufacturers, Nvidia says.

Six more alleged participants were arrested Monday in a $45 million global ATM fraud, including one man who was photographed stuffing $800,000 into a suitcase, federal prosecutors in New York said.

The defendants are alleged to be part of a New York cell that used bogus payment cards to withdraw millions of dollars from more than 100 ATMs in a matter of hours, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.

Defendants Anthony Diaz, 24; Saul Franjul, 23; Saul Genao, 24; Jaindhi Polanco, 29; and Jose Angeley Valerio, 25, pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit access device fraud, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. They face a possible seven-and-a-half years in prison. A sixth defendant, Franklyn Ferreira, was arrested later on Monday but had not been arraigned, the spokesman said.

Hackers raised the withdrawal limits on the cards after breaking into prepaid Visa and MasterCard credit card processors in the U.S. and India, which handled transactions for the Bank of Muscat, based in Oman, and the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah PSC, also known as RAKBANK, in United Arab Emirates.

The style of attack is known as an “unlimited operation,” prosecutors said. Neither of the prepaid debit-card processors has been identified.

The Bank of Muscat lost $40 million in February when criminals made withdrawals, prosecutors said in May when they announced the first indictment.

Franjul is alleged to have packed $800,0000 cash in a suitcase and given it to co-conspirators who then boarded a bus for Florida. The cash was to be delivered to Alberto Yusi Lajud-Peña, one of eight people indicted in May, but who was subsequently found to have been murdered in April in the Dominican Republic.

The attorney’s office released an iPhone photo taken by a co-conspirator that allegedly shows Franjul handling the cash. The New York cell spent proceeds from the heists at high-priced nightclubs and on luxury cars and watches, prosecutors allege.

Two other photos provided by the attorney’s office showed a Facebook post with expensive bottles of alcohol and a receipt for more than $4,000 worth of booze purchased at a New York lounge.

RAKBANK was hit with $5 million in losses after 4,500 ATM withdrawals were made in 20 countries on Dec. 22, 2012. A second large attack between Feb. 19 and 20 saw the Bank of Muscat lose $40 million, withdrawn by people in 20 countries in just 10 hours.

The New York cell is alleged to have withdrawn $2.8 million of RAKBANK’s money in thousands of transactions from 140 ATMs around New York, sending the bulk of it to organizers of the attacks.

Of the eight people indicted in May, four have pleaded guilty to charges related to the thefts, and three others remain charged under a superseding indictment released Monday, prosecutors said.

Monday November 18, 2013 10:12 am PST by Jordan GolsonAfter building large solar power and biogas fuel cell generating facilities at its Maiden, North Carolina data center, Apple is one of the of the largest non-utility clean energy generation companies in the country. As of a report earlier this year, Apple uses 100% renewable energy across all its data centers, plus 75% at its corporate facilities.

Gigaom's Katie Fehrenbacher went to the facility and has written an extensive article with a number of images of both Apple's two gigantic solar farms, as well as its Bloom Energy biogas fuel cell farm. In total, Apple generates roughly 50 megawatts at peak efficiency -- 40MW across two solar farms, plus another 10MW in fuel cells.

With Apple's data center consuming roughly 40 MW of electricity, at times of peak power production the company becomes a net power producer for local utility Duke Energy. Apple appears to be the only major Internet company with its own power generating facilities like these.

Apple’s solar panel farms were built and are operated by Bay Area company SunPower. SunPower manufacturers high-efficient solar panels, solar panel trackers and also develops solar panel projects like Apple’s. The solar farm across from the data center has over 50,000 panels on 100 acres, and it took about a year to build the entire thing.

Each solar panel on Apple’s farms has a microcontroller on its back, and the panels are attached to long, large trackers (the steel poles in the picture). During the day, the computers automatically and gradually tilt the solar panels so that the face of the panels follow the sun throughout the day. The above picture was taken in the late morning, so by the end of the day, the panels will have completely rotated to face where I was standing. The trackers used are single-axis trackers, which basically means they are less complex and less expensive than more precise dual-axis trackers.

Apple works with a company that provides sheep to eat the grass underneath the solar panels, an environmentally friendly alternative to mowing.

For its fuel cell facility, Apple uses biogas fuel cells made by Bloom Energy. Biogas is an alternative to natural gas that can be captured from decomposing organic matter like landfills, water treatment facilities and farms. Natural gas is significantly cheaper, but is a nonrenewable fossil fuel.

When I was walking around the outside of the fuel cell facility I could also see a couple of people doing maintenance work on some of the fuel cells. I’m not sure what they were doing exactly, but fuel cells need some level of maintenance to keep them provided with the fuel, as well as to replace moving parts like fans. Every few years they also need to have a key part replaced called the stack, which can lead to expensive maintenance costs for the fuel cell operator.

Gigaom has much more about the facility in its article, and examines what a number of other tech companies are doing with regards to clean energy as well.

Renewable energy is a hot-button issue at the moment with some outside observers like Greenpeace pushing large Internet companies to adopt clean power for their data centers, which consume some 2 percent of the total electricity produced in the United States each year. Apple has worked hard in recent years to improve its public image with regards to the environment, and recently hired former EPA chief Lisa Jackson to head the company's environmental and sustainability efforts.

Refraining from Google Glass use while driving might sound like common sense to most of us, but apparently it's something Google feels its consumers must be advised against.

These are likely the same people who apply makeup and eat breakfast on the morning commute, so perhaps it wasn't such a bizarre move on Google's part after all, as the company has updated its terms of service this week with guidelines regarding road safety while using Glass.

“Some of our services are available on mobile devices. Do not use such services in a way that distracts you and prevents you from obeying traffic or safety laws.”

Pretty self-explanatory, but we still have people texting and allowing other distractions to keep them from paying attention to the road ahead of them -- hopefully this might enlighten users a little more before they decide to engage in a number of internet-centric tasks while driving.

Monday November 18, 2013 10:23 am PST by Jordan GolsonApple has released the first beta of iOS 7.1 to registered developers for testing purposes. The update can be downloaded via Apple's developer center. The beta arrives as build number 11D5099e. Apple also released a new Apple TV beta.

According to the release notes, iOS 7.1 fixes some network connection issues and some other bugs. There is also a new Yahoo logo, as well as new burst mode upload options and a toggle for a 'dark keyboard' in the Accessibility settings, according to 9to5Mac.

Late last week, Apple released iOS 7.0.4 to all users, fixing an issue with FaceTime calls.

Sprint and Best Buy have begun offering a deal that offers eligible students 12 months of free talk, text, and 1 GB of data when purchasing a phone and an Unlimited, My Way plan.

Sprint's Unlimited, My Way plan is normally priced at $70 per month for smartphones and $50 per month for basic phones, and includes 1 GB of data that can be upgraded to unlimited for an additional $10.

Under the terms of the deal, phones must be purchased at a "Student Offer Price," from Best Buy which does not include contract subsidies. A 16 GB iPhone 5s must be purchased for $700, while a 16 GB iPhone 5c is $600. The iPhone 4s is also included for $500 and an activation fee of $36 is required.

Students must be enrolled in a U.S.-based elementary, high school, college, university, or other accredited institute and will need to verify their student status within 14 days of purchasing a phone at Best Buy.

Best Buy is also offering another 12 months of free service to students for each phone line added to the account on a two-year contract. The deal will be available throughout the holidays, from November 18 to January 4.

AT&T is also offering a holiday discount, giving customers a 50 percent discount off of the standard retail price of the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c with a two-year contract. With the discount, the 16 GB iPhone 5s is priced at $100 while the 16 GB iPhone 5c is $50.

On their eighth album, Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace, the Offspring rant about George W. Bush's America and all the crass consumerism accompanying it, and also snipe at dance beats on "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid" which is par for the course for the Offspring, who always seems to get a neo-novelty tune out of some rhythm or fad they don't like. They still favor frenzied, downstroked guitars and shout-along choruses. Still, the Offspring can't quite hide the passing of time, as they start to drift into power ballads and angsty anthems like "Kristy, Are You Doing Okay?," which feels tailor-made for a CW TV show. Such softening of their stance illustrates that it's impossible to avoid maturity.

Formed: 1985 in Garden Grove, CAGenre: AlternativeYears Active: '80s, '90s, '00s, '10sThe Offspring's metal-inflected punk became a popular sensation in 1994, selling over four million albums on an independent record label. While the group's credentials and approach follow the indie rock tradition of the '80s, sonically the Offspring sound more like an edgy, hard-driving heavy metal band, with their precise, pulsing power chords and Dexter Holland's flat vocals. Featuring Holland, guitarist Kevin "Noodles" Wasserman, bassist Greg Kriesel, and drummer Ron Welty, the Offspring released... Full Bio

Born: September 9, 1941 in Dawson, GAGenre: R&B/SoulYears Active: '60sOne of the most influential soul singers of the 1960s, Otis Redding exemplified to many listeners the power of Southern "deep soul" — hoarse, gritty vocals, brassy arrangements, and an emotional way with both party tunes and aching ballads. He was also the most consistent exponent of the Stax sound, cutting his records at the Memphis label/studios that did much to update R&B into modern soul. His death at the age of 26 was tragic not just because he seemed on the verge of breaking through... Full Bio

Cyber Monday is a great day to find deals online, but one place you won't find a great deal during this year's sales extravaganza on December 2 is Qualcomm's website. While people all over America are perusing Amazon, Ebay, Staples and Walmart for cheap deals, the chip maker will release its previously announced Toq smartwatch for $350.

That's right: We're getting yet another smartwatch that ties into an Android phone. And this time it's just $50 less than an iPad Mini with retina display.

Selling tons of watches doesn't appear to be Qualcomm's goal, however. Qualcomm describes the device, created through the company's wholly-owned subsidiary Qualcomm Connected Experiences, as a "limited edition smartwatch."

As we reported in September, Qualcomm's primary goal with Toq is to show off the technologies and services the company is developing.

Qualcomm's focus is markedly different from Samsung, a company that wants to sell as many units as it can of the Galaxy Gear smartwatch released in October. The Gear, which Jon Philips called "an expensive experiment " in our review, sells for $300 and connects exclusively to Samsung Galaxy devices.

Qualcomm's watch will connect to any Android phone running version 4.0.3 or better—though version 4.3 Jelly Bean is preferred.

The Toq features Qualcomm's Mirasol display technology, which the company claims will last for days without a recharge, even though the TOQ's display is in an always-on state. The watch comes loaded with applets from Accuweather and E*Trade, a set of wireless Bluetooth stereo headphones, and will feature Qualcomm WiPower LE wireless charging.

As with other smartwatches, you can use Toq to accept/reject phone calls, view text messages, calendar alerts, and select notifications from other smartphone apps. Toq will also accept alerts from any AllJoyn-enabled device. AllJoyn is a proprietary technology that allows Qualcomm-powered devices to talk to each other.

Toq won't be the end of the smartwatch parade, though, as more devices are reportedly in the works from Microsoft, Google, HTC, and Apple. Sony, a longtime smartwatch maker, recently released its SmartWatch 2.

Ian is an independent writer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. His current focus is on all things tech including mobile devices, desktop and laptop computers, software, social networks, Web apps, tech-related legislation and corporate tech news.More by Ian Paul

Experts hired by Apple and Samsung explained and justified their differing damages claims to a California jury Monday as the latest battle between the two smartphone giants moves closer to a conclusion.

The two companies have been arguing in front of a jury for four days over the amount of money Samsung should pay to Apple for infringement of five of Apple's patents in 13 models of Samsung smartphones and tablets. Apple wants $380 million and Samsung is arguing that $52 million is a more fair amount.

The question of damages is in front of the court after Judge Lucy Koh ruled a jury miscalculated damages when it considered the matter in a case last year. That case confirmed Samsung's infringement of the patents in multiple phones and tablets, and the jury ordered Samsung should pay just over $1 billion. Judge Koh cut $450 million from the award because of the bad jury math. The current trial is re-evaluating the damages. The patent infringement ruling stands and that aspect is not being argued again.

The court heard first on Monday from Samsung's damages expert, Michael Wagner, under questioning from Apple's lawyers. On Friday he told the court that he disagreed with all of the conclusions of Apple's damages expert, Julie Davis.

Apple says it would have sold an additional 360,000 iPhones if Samsung hadn't used its patented technology in its phones and part of the payment it wants covers its lost profits in those lost sales.

On Monday, Wagner repeated his assertion that Apple wouldn't have won additional sales. Samsung is arguing that consumers pick its phones for many reasons, chief among them the larger screens, the desire to use Android or Google services and longer battery life. But the patented features don't influence buying decisions.

The Apple patents in question cover the phone's ability to automatically switch between single and multitouch gestures, the "rubber-band" effect that makes the screen bounce when coming to the limit of scrolling, and the effect of a tap on the screen to re-center the display after zooming.

Whether Apple lost any sales will be one of the first questions for the jury to answer because it has a direct impact on the size of the damages award that will be made.

The two experts also argued over how much money Samsung made from selling the 13 infringing products. The question on basic profits centered around how certain expenses incurred by Samsung should be attributed -- to some of the infringing phones or to the mobile phone division in general.

It's probably more detail than the eight jury members ever wanted to know about the ins and outs of the mobile phone business, and it was also the last time they'd be hearing it. The two sides rested their cases just before the court took a lunch break.

The court is set for closing arguments Tuesday. Each side will have 90 minutes, then, after a lunch break, the jury is scheduled to begin its deliberations.

The case is 11-01846, Apple v. Samsung, at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

In a separate ruling in the patent infringement case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Monday said that Judge Koh erred when she denied Apple's request for an injunction on sales of Samsung products that were found to infringe Apple patents.

She had ruled that the monetary damage was enough compensation for Apple in that case. The appellate court found that parts of her ruling were correct, but sent the case back to her to reconsider Apple's arguments that it was damaged by Samsung's patent infringement, which may warrant an injunction.

The new app for iOS includes current features our customers love as well as several new functions presented in a clear, touch-friendly, personalized design. The new easy-to-use home screen, travel cards and travel wallet add convenience right from the beginning of your travel experience. The organized look and larger graphics help you manage your travel with just one touch, and you can book fights and get information about your flight using the app’s personalized features.

Also included in the app is a new booking feature that allows users to make multi-segment bookings, an updated flight status view that includes details about flight times, seat maps, standby, and upgrades, and a travel wallet that holds information about boarding passes, reservations, flight notifications, and United Club memberships in one place.

United Airlines is a free app for iOS devices and can be downloaded through the App Store. [Direct Link] [ 27 comments ]Tweet Top Rated Comments(View all)wikiversePosted: 4 days ago at 01:29 amYea, but United Breaks Guitars.Rating: 5 Positivesgiantfan1224Posted: 3 days ago at 08:33 amProblem is United is the WORST airline I have ever flown! There was an issue with my seat when I flew with my wife and there were several deadheads on the flight. They made one of US leave the flight, even though several of the deadheads said they could have easily went on a later flight and been fine.

I am not sure under what circumstances this is considered acceptable. My wife was the one to leave, as she could see that I was steaming mad and it would have been a bad situation. The did give her a first class seat and a lunch voucher, but only after she talked with several people there about it. That should have been offered from the beginning.I'm not sure that your one experience is indicative of the airline as a whole and, for someone that has flown a lot, I have my fair share of horror stories for each airline but what exactly does that have to do with the app?Rating: 3 PositivesMind The MacPosted: 3 days ago at 03:44 pmThe update notes say they added the TSA Pre-Check logo to the Passbook boarding pass. This would suggest Passbook support has been maintained.

Interesting to compare the Delta App with the United one. Delta could do well to add the live update feature to the Passbook card to reflect gate changes etc in realtime, like the United one.Rating: 2 PositivesLedgemPosted: 3 days ago at 08:44 amI hope that they maintain Passbook support. I had the opportunity to use it recently, and it was wonderful.

I used their app to load the checked-in tickets into Passbook. The morning of the flight, my lock screen included the airline tickets on-screen. I could swipe on them to bring the tickets up, and could easily swipe between my and my wife's tickets. This made it easy to bring the tickets up for scanning at the airport (TSA security point and the airline gate). We had a connector, and upon getting out of "airplane mode" the phone automatically cycled to having the connector's tickets on the lock screen. When I landed at my destination, the tickets disappeared from the lock screen. All four tickets were still available inside of the Passbook application, if I really wanted to see them. The return flights home provided the same experience.

It's much more convenient than having to unlock the phone, find the app, and then fumble with it to pull up the boarding pass.Rating: 2 Positivesgiantfan1224Posted: 3 days ago at 08:04 amI also agree with others that the "where is this aircraft coming from" feature is gold. On more than one occasion I rebooked a flight because I could see it being late before it was ever posted by the airline.

United was smart to leave in all the good stuff that came from the Continental app. In fact, most of what makes United a somewhat decent airline today is a hold over from Continental (i.e. showers in the clubs in Houston. Nothing is better than a hot shower after a red-eye).Rating: 2 PositivesbalamwPosted: 4 days ago at 03:39 amI use this app as I travel almost exclusively on united. I will give this new version a whirl. I did think in the old app it was a bit clunky the way you had to load passbook with your boarding pass, so hopefully this will be an improvement.Yeah, the old app was clunky but quite powerful this one has the potential to be even better.

I hope they kept the "where is this plane coming from" feature in flight status as it has helped me predict when flights are going to be late even though they still claim to be "on time".

BRating: 2 PositivesTheRealTVGuyPosted: 4 days ago at 02:25 amThat home screen looks a little like (dare I say it...!) Windows 8.Rating: 2 PositivesLedgemPosted: 3 days ago at 07:40 amPassbook just tells me to download the United app which I did, and I signed in and checked in with the app, no dice, wtf?

Maybe it's US only? Since I am flying from Canada..I doubt that it's US only. It wasn't 100% automatic. I don't remember the process exactly, and these steps apply to the older app; hopefully they've streamlined it a bit with the newer one.

If I remember right, first I had to add my confirmation number to the United app. However, then I had to add the number to my itinerary within the app (basically, just pasting the same number in again - it seemed a bit silly, considering that the information was already in the app). Checking in through the app becomes possible 24 hours before your scheduled flight time. I believe that when you reach the end of the check-in process, there's a set of options about how you would like your boarding passes. I stuck with the electronic passes. However, you then need to view the passes within the app; at that point, there's an option about adding the passes to Passbook.

Again, those were the steps roughly involved with the older version of the app. I don't know how the newer app has changed them, if at all.

One final note, mentioned in my previous post: it seems as if the passes need to be manually deleted from Passbook. My last flight was about two weeks ago, and the passes are still accessible from Passbook. I think that this is a good thing, but I figure it's worth mentioning. Wouldn't want people panicking because they open Passbook to see if their flight tickets are accessible, only to find the tickets from the previous flights in there and then panic in thinking that the program messed up and just gave them the previous tickets :pRating: 1 PositivesshartypantsPosted: 3 days ago at 08:03 amThat home screen looks a little like (dare I say it...!) Windows 8.You mean iOS 7 looks like Window 8? Unfortunately I agree.Rating: 1 Positivesgiantfan1224Posted: 4 days ago at 07:47 amI had always felt that the United app was pretty lacking overall compared to, say, the Delta app (which IMHO is awesome even if the airline itself sucks). Hoping this update brings a little more parity.You might have to be specific because I have and use both apps and the United one is so much better with a lot more capability, like booking a reward ticket or seeing my upgrade status on the standby list.

MacRumors attracts a broad audience of both consumers and professionals interested in the latest technologies and products. We also boast an active community focused onpurchasing decisions and technical aspects of the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Mac platforms.

Attackers are actively exploiting a known vulnerability to compromise JBoss Java EE application servers that expose the HTTP Invoker service to the Internet in an insecure manner.

At the beginning of October security researcher Andrea Micalizzi released an exploit for a vulnerability he identified in products from multiple vendors including Hewlett-Packard, McAfee, Symantec and IBM that use 4.x and 5.x versions of JBoss. That vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2013-4810, allows unauthenticated attackers to install an arbitrary application on JBoss deployments that expose the EJBInvokerServlet or JMXInvokerServlet.

Micalizzi's exploit installs a Web shell application called pwn.jsp that can be used to execute shell commands on the operating system via HTTP requests. The commands are executed with the privileges of the OS user running JBoss, which in the case of some JBoss deployments can be a high privileged, administrative user.

Over 200 sites running on JBoss servers, including some that belong to governments and universities have been hacked and infected with these Web shell applications, said Barry Shteiman, director of security strategy at Imperva.

The problem is actually bigger because the vulnerability described by Micalizzi stems from insecure default configurations that leave JBoss management interfaces and invokers exposed to unauthenticated attacks, a issue that has been known for years.

In a 2011 presentation about the multiple ways in which unsecured JBoss installations can be attacked, security researchers from Matasano Security estimated, based on a Google search for certain strings, that there were around 7,300 potentially vulnerable servers.

According to Shteiman, the number of JBoss servers with management interfaces exposed to the Internet has more than tripled since then, reaching over 23,000.

One reason for this increase is probably that people have not fully understood the risks associated with this issue when it was discussed in the past and continue to deploy insecure JBoss installations, Shteiman said. Also, some vendors ship products with insecure JBoss configurations, like the products vulnerable to Micalizzi's exploit, he said.

Products vulnerable to CVE-2013-4810 include McAfee Web Reporter 5.2.1, HP ProCurve Manager (PCM) 3.20 and 4.0, HP PCM+ 3.20 and 4.0, HP Identity Driven Manager (IDM) 4.0, Symantec Workspace Streaming 7.5.0.493 and IBM TRIRIGA. However, products from other vendors that have not yet been identified could also be vulnerable.

JBoss is developed by Red Hat and was recently renamed to WildFly. Its latest stable version is 7.1.1, but according to Shteiman many organizations still use JBoss 4.x and 5.x for compatibility reasons as they need to run old applications developed for those versions.

The one truth of pretty much every gold rush in history is that the people who made out like bandits weren't the adventurous suckers looking for gold, but the ones selling the shovels and mining pans.

More than a century since the last great gold rush, not much has changed. These days, modern-day prospectors are looking for Bitcoins instead of gold, and trading shovels for application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) rigs and GPU-loaded motherboards.

But just as before, all kinds of companies are rushing in to sell them the latest and greatest mining gear. Even mainstream PC makers are getting into the business.

Taipei-based ASRock recently released two completely insane motherboards specifically designed for Bitcoin mining. ASRock's H61 Pro BTC and the H81 Pro BTC are supposed to be a Bitcoin miner's dream, coming loaded with six PCIe slots, and extra four-pin power connectors to support up to six graphics cards simultaneously. The H61 supports up to Ivy Bridge-era Intel Core processors, while the H81 works with the latest Haswell Core chips.

The ability to harness the power of graphics processing units is a key component of Bitcoin mining. Prospectors need the power of GPUs to crunch complex mathematical problems that have to be solved in order to create new Bitcoins.

Or at least that's the way it used to be. These days, ASIC rigs capable of processing billions of hashes—the end result of those aforementioned complex math problems—per second are becoming the preferable way to mine for the digital currency.

If you're not familiar with it, Bitcoin is a digital, peer-to-peer currency gaining popularity in technology circles. Bitcoins are created at a fixed rate and mining for the digital currency will cease after 21 million Bitcoins exist. There are currently about 12 million Bitcoins in existence. (Our Bitcoin primer has even more information about the digital currency.)

With the cost of a single Bitcoin recently surging past $600, there's never been a better time to be crunching numbers to create new Bitcoins, but competition is also increasing as Bitcoin mining becomes serious business. So instead of investing in a mining rig, perhaps you're better off buying some stock from the companies selling the digital shovels.

Ian is an independent writer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. His current focus is on all things tech including mobile devices, desktop and laptop computers, software, social networks, Web apps, tech-related legislation and corporate tech news.More by Ian Paul

Google has announced plans to continue its rollout of solar energy plants in the U.S. with its second largest investment to date: $80 million for six new facilities.

So far, Google has committed over $1 billion to wind and solar power plants that create clean energy and generate "attractive financial returns," it said in a blog post.

The new plants, which will be built in California and Arizona, are expected to generate 160 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to power 17,000 typical U.S. homes. They are expected to be operational by early 2014.

The 17.5 megawatt/22 megawatt Victor Phelan project, located in San Bernardino, California, is part of six Recurrent Energy developed projects acquired by Google and KKR.

"You'd think the thrill might wear off this whole renewable energy investing thing after a while. Nope—we're still as into it as ever, which is why we're so pleased to announce our 14th investment," Google wrote on its official blog.

All together, Google's 14 renewable power facilities will be able to generate 2 billion watts (gigawatts) of energy, enough to power 500,000 homes or all of the public elementary schools in New York, Oregon, and Wyoming for one year, the company said.

Recurrent EnergyThe 17.5 megawatt/22 megawatt Victor Phelan project, located in San Bernardino, Calif., is part of six Recurrent Energy developed projects acquired by Google and KKR.

The latest solar power investment is similar to one Google made in 2011, when it partnered with global investment firm KKR and invested $94 million in four solar facilities built by Recurrent Energy.

"Those facilities have since started generating electricity, and we've committed hundreds of millions more—more than $1 billion in total—to renewable energy projects around the world," Google said in its blog. "These investments are all part of our drive toward a clean energy future—where renewable energy is abundant, accessible and affordable.

As before, Google is partnering with KKR to finance its the utility-scale solar facilities in California and Arizona. Recurrent Energy will again build the plants.

Google now gets about 20 percent of its power from solar facilities, but the company has committed to achieving 100 percent renewable energy.

In addition to locations in California and Arizona, Google has data centers in Oklahoma and Iowa so they can plug into wind farms.

Microsoft built one data center next to a Wyoming landfill in order to use methane gas to power the facility. Apple now uses a massive 100-acre solar energy farm to power its Maiden, North Carolina data center.

Over the past six years, the growth in wind farm deployments in the U.S. has been second only to gas-powered electrical plants.

According to the latest data, 6.8 gigawatts of wind power was added in the U.S. in 2011, a 31 percent increase over 2010. That 2011 jump brought the cumulative wind power capacity for the U.S. to 47 gigawatts, according to a study published by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The latest data from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) shows that the U.S. now has more than 6.4 gigawatts of installed solar electric capacity, enough power for more than a million households. This year is expected to exceed all others for new solar installations.